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Kathy Orr Meteorologist & Mom
By Matt Stringer

“Isabella said to me the other day ‘I think it’s going to rain,” said Kathy Orr, Emmy-award winning meteorologist for CBS 3’s Eyewitness News Team. Isabella, 5, may not know as much as Orr does about the changing weather patterns and the unpredictability of precipitation, but maybe one day she will.

Isabella is Orr’s first child. Her second, William, 2, is a little too young to comment deeply about meteorology. When William was born, Isabella, or, as Orr calls her, Bell, wanted to call him “sticky.”

Orr relishes the time she spends with her children. “I spend all my free time with them,” Orr said. “Even on Saturday nights we’re having other families over.”

Her husband, Peter, is staying at home for a couple years from his career as an insurance salesman so they can spend more time together as a family, but they both juggle the responsibilities of raising children.

“It’s turned out really well,” Orr said. “I think we’re just so busy. He still has to go to certain conferences. I’m home in the morning. I get my daughter to school. It’s good that I’m home in the morning and leave in the afternoon. We make an excellent tag team.”

She gets home late at night and tries at least two or three times a week to bring her daughter to school. They also have their little rituals like when Orr does “the pick up” at Isabella’s school.

“My time off is so precious,” Orr said. “When the weather is really quiet I might be able to scoot home and tuck her in. It’s always a big surprise so that’s always fun.”

 A typical day off for the family might involve playing in the park on swing sets and jungle gyms in Moorestown, N.J. where they now live. Or they might go on hikes or swimming.

“They love to swim at the Y,” Orr said.

The one thing Orr and her family can’t wait for is the summer. Ever since she was a little girl growing up in Syracuse, N.Y. she and her family would trek all the way to Cape May, N.J. for summer vacations. “My parents fell in love with it,” Orr said.

And her love of the shore doesn’t end at lounging around at the beach watching the waves crash onto the sand. Orr received recognition from the New Jersey Governor’s Office in 2003 for her “Orr at the Shore” series of summer reports on a variety of shore-related topics, like the turtles of Sea Isle City, which is where the turtles migrate.

“It was bringing awareness to environmental issues at the shore,” Orr said. “We had a project going with Rutgers University that we’re doing again this year involving sea surface temperature, which is information that helps everyone from beachgoers to fishermen. The wind drives a lot of the changes in ocean temperature. We did a whole marine effort with them.”

The one thing you may not know about Orr is that her first appearance on television wasn’t forecasting the weather; she was a contestant on MTV’s first non-musical program, Remote Control.

“They came to Syracuse and they had auditions,” Orr said. “I had a final exam and I asked my professor if I could take it a later time. They picked a bunch of us. I had a blast. I lost.”

But she ended up working for Nickelodeon and MTV for two years on several kids game shows: Double Dare, Make the Grade, and Don’t Just Sit There. The latter Orr explained was “like a tweeny version of David Lettermen. It started a big interest for me in children’s programs.”

And that it did. Several years ago, the station and Orr taught children across the region about what the life of a meteorologist is like with CBS’s community project, Kidcasters. The program gave children the opportunity to make a live appearance on a CBS 3 weathercast.

“We used to do it in the malls and every Saturday would be a different mall,” Orr said. “We would audition kids to do the weather in an effort to get them more involved in math and science. There would be a big casting call. We selected the lucky three and they appeared doing the weather on television. They came in all dressed up. The girls had their dresses. The boys had their suits. It’s really amazing to see how many were interested. We still get requests to do it again.”

Matt Stringer is the editor of Curious Parents.